Regurgitation as curation at BuzzFeed

If you read my post last week about the practice by, well, new and old media companies alike, in which “lists” and slide shows that appear somewhere (say, on a blog) are re-written (or just used word-for-word) and posted on the “media” site who operate under under the banner of, “we’re a curation news sie,” you may find interesting this excellent piece at Slate.com by Farhad Manjoo. In it, he breaks down how a site like BuzzFeed re-gurgitates, rather than curates, the work of others — and how they use Reddit to find stories to re-gurgitate.

Quote:

“BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell, deliberately—their posts are hard to trace back to the original source material…..Once you understand how central Reddit is to BuzzFeed, it’s like spotting the wizard behind the curtain. Whenever you see a popular BuzzFeed post, search Reddit, and all will be revealed.”

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Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)